Denis Glover’s Poetry

An adequate evaluation of the poetry of Denis Glover has yet to be made. In the space of a brief review of his latest and finest volume, it cannot be attempted; but certain comments are worth making. Glover in New Zealand, like Louis MacNeice in England, has been underestimated as a serious poet because of his propensity for satire and a subtle self-depreciation (‘These songs will not stand . . .’ etc.): also on account of the apparently casual simplicity of his style. In fact his purely satirical poems are rare and of comparative unimportance; and his lucid style is the product of prolonged and intense processes of composition, the word fitting the experience like a glove. He has assimilated to his own use the techniques of Georgian verse, of the Scots ballads, perhaps also of Greek and Anglo-Saxon verse – and in this volume, it seems, of the later songs of Keats.

In the repetition and exploration of certain themes, however, lies the measure of his success beyond all other New Zealand poets. Where others have seen New Zealand in anthropological, historical, even geological terms, Glover has seen her through the wrong end of a telescope, a world of experience intensified and crystallised in a few lyrics. The first eleven poems of this volume, apart from their superlative technical brilliance, embody what is perhaps the only successful myth yet created by a New Zealand poet:

That was a good place to be camping in, sings Harry,
Where we unsaddled and hobbled the horses
Heading over Honeycomb Pass and Mount Thin
For sheep and heat and dust and a hundred watercourses.

Harry is Ishmael the Wandering Jew, the Fool who is also prophet and oracle. His comment, that is Glover’s comment, on human society is invariably destructive – human beings are sick automata engaged in ruining each other. Outside human society, however, exists the Sea, image of oblivion and renewal, and the temenos of the Land where reconciliation is possible with fellow beings and with the rich presences which haunt childhood experience. Though Nature also can mirror the desolation of individual man (‘Drift’, ‘The Ware’), in general the natural world is for Glover a source of spiritual refreshment. Notably in one poem, ‘Dunedin Revisited’, he has fused completely the vision and the fact:

A long sunset spills
On those returning
And the manuka hills
Know the slow smoke of burning.

page 88

The love poetry, satire and the film commentary included in this volume have not been mentioned. They alone would make it valuable; but the ‘Sings Harry’ lyrics and certain similar poems are very likely the most intense, evocative and formally perfect work ever produced in this country.

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